SSD (OS) + RAID 5 (3 HDD) - advice

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inac

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Apr 16, 2010
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So I have a 500gb SSD that I'd like to use for the main OS for this build

and 3 x 2TB HDD's that I'd like to set up a RAID 5 (in case they fail)

I've never tried setting up hybrid ssd+hhd's... So:

0) I assume that because the 500gb SSD isn't part of the RAID that it won't affect the storage of the 2tb HDDs?

1) Do the sata connectors need to be in a certain order, with ssd being the in sata1 - or order doesn't matter, just set them in BIOS?
2) Is this setup recommended?
3) Does it matter if I install the OS already on the SSD before setting up RAID on the HDDs?

advice appreciated. thanks!
 
Solution
geofelt
0) true.
1) no matter.
2) no.
3) No.

Re# 2:
The value of raid-1 and it's variants like raid-5 is that you can recover from a drive failure quickly. It is for servers that can not tolerate any interruption.
Modern hard drives have a advertised mean time to failure on the order of 500,000+ hours. That is something like 50 years. SSD's are similar.
With raid-1 you are protecting yourself from specifically a hard drive failure. Not from other failures such as viruses, operator error,
malware, raid controller failure fire, theft, etc.
For that, you need external backup. If you have external backup, and can tolerate some recovery time, you do not need raid-1
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firefoxx04

firefoxx04

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Jan 23, 2009
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You will probably install the OS onto the SSD. Make sure to install the RAID drivers before setting up the raid.

Then go to your bios/UEFI and enable the raid controller (or your raid card). Setup the raid5 with the 3 hard drives. The SSD will be ignored if you dont choose to add it to the array.

Now, raid has its own disadvantages. Raid controllers on motherboards are not the best but they are not as terrible as people will make you think. If this is a home setup and not a heavily used workstation or server then you will be fine.

Raid5 might not perform as great as you want, so dont expect amazing write performance. You can expect double the read performance, if you are lucky.

Raid5 with large disks (1TB + ) presents different problems. If the event that a drive fails, and you replace it. You might run into a read error during the rebuild, which will prevent the rebuild from being successful. This is a problem with large disks because the chances of having a read failure are much higher than say 250GB or 500GB drives. Usually we try to run RAID6 or ZFS Raidz2 or 3 (double and tripple parity). The risk is for you to think about. You can still run raid5.

Lastly, Raid is NOT a backup. Raid controllers can fail, Raid5 can fail, etc etc etc. Raid is purely to keep you online in the event that a drive fails, not to give you impeccable data protection.
 
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geofelt

geofelt

Titan
Oct 9, 2006
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0) true.
1) no matter.
2) no.
3) No.

Re# 2:
The value of raid-1 and it's variants like raid-5 is that you can recover from a drive failure quickly. It is for servers that can not tolerate any interruption.
Modern hard drives have a advertised mean time to failure on the order of 500,000+ hours. That is something like 50 years. SSD's are similar.
With raid-1 you are protecting yourself from specifically a hard drive failure. Not from other failures such as viruses, operator error,
malware, raid controller failure fire, theft, etc.
For that, you need external backup. If you have external backup, and can tolerate some recovery time, you do not need raid-1
 
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